HILAC Moves to a Perpetual Swim School Model

Published on 26 March 2025

Following recommendations from the independently conducted 2024 Hamilton Indoor Leisure and Aquatic Centre (HILAC) Service Review, HILACs swimming program will be expanded from Tuesday 22 April, moving to a Perpetual model, ensuring young swimmers can continue to build their skills through school term holidays.

The perpetual program will replace the former term-based approach, running for 48 weeks of the year, breaking for summer/Christmas holidays.

Perpetual Swim School models are shown to have many benefits including:

• Consistent learning: With less downtime between lessons, students can continuously build upon their skills from week to week.
• Consistent timetable scheduling: Class timetables will remain the same throughout the year, allowing families the opportunity to find days and times that suit their schedule, without requirement to change each term.
• Personalised progress: Students will be able to advance at their own pace in alignment with teacher recommendations.
• Stronger student – instructor relationships: Continuity of lessons will help staff build stronger relationships and allow time to get to know each swimmers’ strengths, weaknesses, and learning styles, leading to more effective teaching.

The service review involved an in-depth review of the Swim School which uncovered opportunities for HILAC to improve services for the community and to work better with those who use the services most.

HILAC Centre Manager Di Dixon encourages families to get in touch if they have any concerns.

“HILAC is a community minded facility that makes every effort to enact processes that benefit the most members possible and have the best impact on wellbeing outcomes within our community.

“We know that post Covid, swimming skills across the nation have declined. A recent report from Royal Life Saving shows that 48% of all year 6 students are unable to swim continuously for 50 metres or tread water for 2 minutes. Both are key water survival skills. In this community, many of our children spend Summers and weekends by in pools, dams and close to waterways. Our community needs to be proactive in doing what we can to change these statistics.

“Introducing a perpetual model will ensure consistency for our students which is shown to have positive outcomes on retention of skills learned. This is a change to our swim model which we appreciate will take some time to get used to, so we encourage parents with any questions to reach out and share your thoughts with us,” concluded Ms Dixon.

Swim lessons will run continuously through until the Christmas/New Year break with the final lessons for the year being Saturday 19 December 2025.

Clients have been notified of this change already via email and anyone seeking further information or clarification is encouraged to contact our friendly HILAC staff at aquaticprograms@hilac.com.au.

For more information about swim school or the many services available at our facilities, Parents are encouraged to contact HILAC at (03) 5551 4300.

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